Gygax 75: wrap-up & suggestions

Looking back on this challenge as a whole - the intention was to see if it worked as a set up for a Spelljamming campaign, short answer, yes if a little inefficiently. It was interesting to use a workflow that is not my habitual one to try something different. I am a big fan of 'learn the rule so you know when to break them'.

One thing I found about the challenge is the 'straight through, expand outwards' approach is not my usual one and works less well for me. I typically build a world in broad strokes, then zoom in, see what the implications are, elaborate, zoom in again, etc. Things like - what is in the Dungeon, why do we care (week 3) only became clear after the city was created (week 4) and the big hook for the whole campaign (week 1) seemed weak until well into week 4. I found myself iterating back around on the whys and what must therefore be in any given place. Not a dreadful burden but definitely, this is not the way I normally like to work.

Weeks 2, 4 and 5 were fine, the broader world work was stable for me. Week 1 - the theme of the campaign and how to pitch it and week 3 - what is in the dungeon changed somewhat.

Revisiting Week 1 - the premise is now - the whole system is 'the dungeon' - remote, without much in the way of rest or resupply, but with great wealth to be had through hunting beasts found nowhere else. Interestingly for a Spelljammer campaign the ship-scale and foot-scales make the whole thing fractal - you solve the ship-scale issues to get to the foot scale issues.

Tweaking Week 3 - the 'what' of the dungeon stayed stable but the 'who' and 'why' evolved. It was clear from the start there was a spider-vampire living in it but now the why anyone cares to go there is because they hoard knowledge, having salvaged from the wrecks of crashed ships and stolen from the off-world colonists to accrue all of the extant spellbooks with knowledge of spelljamming helms. No new helms shall be built until someone braves that dungeon.

Does the whole thing work at the core of it? Did I end up with a campaign ready to run - yes. As noted throughout there were other work-flows, random tables and miscellaneous DM tools brought to play to help deliver or expand on the Gygax 75 goals:
- Crystal sphere generating with classic Spelljammer
- Dungeonfruit's "Making Good Factions" for a star system
- Overloaded Wildspace Voyage Dice & Gravity Slingshots

It is a lot of work and I found the 'lesson plan' aspect of it a bit discouraging - perhaps attacking the various elements in different orders might work better for different people? I worked through it together with the in-house testing team and there we actually started work on it months ago in order to get it all done as we had to align a) time available and b) creative capacity. In any case, it is a non-trivial lift to do all this so I would shamelessly recommend leaning on whatever generators, random tables, cheat sheets or what have you to get this done.

I would suggest that anyone setting out to build a campaign along the Gygax 75 guidelines ought to draw on the deep well of great ideas the OSR, FKR and GLOG spaces have come up with - some of my immediate suggestions would be:
- Random Dungeon Creation Kit on The Lizard Man Diaries
- Dungeonfruit writes Making Good Factions (For Your Dungeon)
- Grendel Mendel: Using Punnett Squares For Monster Design
- Watabous Medieval Fantasy City Generator
- Random Tables: Stupidly-Quick City-Building by u/OrkishBlade on r/DnDBehindTheScreen
- A System for Creating Fantasy Hamlets, Villages, Towns, Cities, Metropolises… on The Collaborative Gamer
- Make Your Own New Crobuzon challenge from Githtyanki Diaspora

Particularly the New Crobuzon challenge is easily expanded in scale - use the same principles but for a region, nation, continent - and it jumpstarts your creativity.

Anyone interested in more Gygax 75, see DIY & Dragons collation of a bunch of peoples attempts or you can try it yourself by going to Ray Otus itch.io. You can also read more about the origins on Viridian Scroll.